


In the Name of the Father

by Dame_Lazarus



Series: To arms! To arms! [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It, Minor Character Death, Mythology - Freeform, One Shot, POV Brienne of Tarth, r/jaimebrienne, season 8 fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:27:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24936037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dame_Lazarus/pseuds/Dame_Lazarus
Summary: Brienne has always wanted to die defending a lord she believed in. She has wanted a life protecting the innocent and the defenseless. With that path comes war, battle, death—she knows it and she accepts it. It is worth it, to chase such ends.Vengeance is not so clear a path.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Series: To arms! To arms! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1775347
Comments: 20
Kudos: 70
Collections: Jaime and Brienne Subreddit Fan Creation Challenges





	In the Name of the Father

**Author's Note:**

> another little piece with a loose Greek mythology motif for the r/jaimebrienne subreddit challenge.

  
There is a commotion at the Winterfell gate. A bedraggled man, blood on his face, blood on his tunic, is trying to get past the guards. Brienne rushes toward them, hand on the hilt of her sword.

When he sees her, he stops, frozen in stone.

“My lady,” he says. He drops the bag he’s clutching to his chest, and then she sees it, underneath: the sun and star, the rose and blue, obscured by grime and who knows what else.

Something rolls from the bag across the frozen dirt of the courtyard, away from where they are gathered. She walks toward it. 

“My lady,” the man says again. She knows him. From the household guard, back home. His beard is grayer. He is yelling now, his voice like he’s being dragged across hot coals.

She looks down. A face without a body looks up at her. Swollen. Purple on one side. An eyelid, half open. She does not recognize this face but she knows him, too. She’s known him since she first drew breath. 

Brienne cannot take her eyes away. There are hands at her sides, at her elbows, pulling her. But she will not go. She stands frozen, as if in stone.  
  


* * *

  
They have been here for a fortnight. Two hundred-odd Lannister men camp outside the walls of the Stark castle, braziers lit against the cold wind and snow. They left the capital with closer to three hundred, but many dispersed when they reached the Westerlands proper and Jaime revealed what they were really going to fight. 

“You have leave to go, if you cannot fight alongside horse lords and Starks against the threat from beyond the Wall,” Jaime had proclaimed to the entire camp. Brienne stood beside him; the day had just dawned weakly over their heads. Many did just that. Jaime flinched as jeers fluttered through the crowd. More than one man spit at his feet.

 _I’m not looking forward to this_ , Jaime had muttered, as they walked to meet the men assembled for early muster. _Starks and Dothraki cut down their friends, their sons, their fathers._

But he did it. The dead would cut them all down, no matter which House they rode for.

“The Queen doesn’t know about this, does she,” Ser Addam Marbrand asked them, quietly. The men who were leaving were loudly packing up around them. He was not among them; he did not even look their way. He was Jaime’s oldest friend, and his kin, besides.

Jaime didn’t answer. “She’ll make us all pay for this, I expect,” Addam said.

They rode hard to Winterfell, just in case she started right away. But when they got there, they found that the payback had already begun.

Once they’d all been greeted and housed and glared at, Lady Sansa took her aside. “You must know, Brienne, that we’ve had word of an attack on Tarth,” she said. “Queen Cersei has hired the Golden Company, and she has decided to camp them on Tarth until she has need of them.”

“That’s a terrible strategy,” Brienne replied, because she knew she must say something, but she could not think of what else to say.

“It isn’t about strategy at all,” Lady Sansa spat. “It’s about her being a vindictive bitch.”

Brienne wandered aimlessly after that—through the gate, along the outer walls, among the crimson rows of Lannister tents. Her father and his men would have put up a fight. They defended Tarth from pirates, constantly, like one battles rats in a granary. They would not have retreated. But Sansa’s raven came from Haystack Hall, as they heard the heir to Tarth was in their service, and they had no more news than the barest of events: battle, soldier, occupation. 

The night was growing dark, and the men they had left to them huddled nervously around campfires. She knew Jaime planned to camp out here, among the Lannister soldiers: a sign that he had not abandoned them. 

She hadn’t been looking for him, but she found him: up ahead, in his full armor and his too-light red cloak. His face changed when he spotted her. He walked briskly forward, dodging his own soldiers, and then he stopped, suddenly, a few paces away. 

“Tyrion told me,” Jaime said, looking down at the ground. “I’m so sorry. I hadn’t known—I didn’t think—“

“I know,” she said. She hadn’t either. She had thought no one even knew she had been in King’s Landing. And all those people. Because of her.

“When this is over—“

Brienne put up her hand to silence him.

“We cannot think of that now,” she had told him. They had a war to win, first. Tarth would not be safe otherwise. 

* * *

  
Someone moves her away from the gate: a heavy push-pull as if by pulley and lever. There is screaming and yelling. None of it is her. She is wordless, staring. 

People put their bodies in between her and the head on the ground. She is glad they do, because she cannot look away. Those eyes, the ones she last saw leaving for Renly’s camp, years ago. She’s hoped she would return home one day, and see them full of pride, and not worry and resignation. Now his eyes are closed and full of nothing.

“Podrick, see to this,” someone says. “Take that man in to speak to Lady Stark.” 

She is across the yard now. Leaning up against the wall, stiff. She cannot see him anymore. She faces away from the gate. 

“Brienne, look at me.” It’s Jaime. She looks. It takes all the effort she has. 

“Willard,” she says. “The man. He’s—he’s in the household guard.”

He nods. “Podrick is looking after him. You needn’t worry.”

Brienne feels her face crack into a hundred pieces. _What is left to worry about, now?_

* * *

  
They spend the rest of the afternoon moving her around. She is a paperweight. A decoration. A statue in a sept, where people look up and say prayers and soft words, and she does not hear them, or respond.

Willard has been on a ship. He was released in White Harbor to walk north and deliver a message to the new Evenstar. His wrists are chafed; he was bound. He was in the yard, he says, when Euron Greyjoy sauntered in with men in bloodstained armor and demanded surrender. No one would. Only Willard survived.

They send Willard to rest. Sansa worries about Greyjoy ships being so close. Brienne nods along. What they must think of her, a warrior undone by her first grisly sight. 

Then they move her again. Jaime tries to get her to eat. “Live, fight, and take revenge,” he urges. Statues do not have such needs, though, and so she does not, either.

After the sun sets they move her, once more. This time, outside, to the godswood. Everyone is gathered around a small raised pile of straw. Lady Sansa, in her regal black. Lady Arya, with mussed hair and dusty breeches. King Jon, one hand on his brother’s wheeled chair and the other grasped around a lighted torch. Podrick on her one side. Jaime on the other.

Tyrion walks up, grave-faced as always, alongside his Targaryen queen, pristine in white from her hair to her fur-trimmed cloak. She places her hand on Brienne’s arm consolingly as she passes, her eyes kind. Daenerys is her queen, too, she supposes. And she has no allies in the Stormlands. Brienne could become the first.

“I am sorry we must do it this way,” Lady Sansa says to her, as everyone shifts into position around the pyre. “But with the dead coming—we must be cautious. You won’t have to see him, under all this. I’m sorry you had to see him like that at all. When they took my father’s head, Joffrey made me look into his eyes as he rotted up on the wall. No daughter should have to see her father like that.” Though her voice is lowered, everyone is silent enough that it carries. Sansa must know; she slides her eyes over toward Tyrion and Jaime defiantly. 

Tyrion, across from them, looks down at the ground. His queen turns a furious glare at Jaime, her half-smile a poisoned knife. Jaime must see it, though he stares straight ahead at his brother’s bowed head. 

_Everyone here has lost fathers in this war,_ she realizes. They have lost them terribly and viciously, most at the hands of the very men they stand next to now, or near enough. They have torn up continents and cities in their grief. Their revenge has soaked the kingdom in blood.

Brienne has always wanted to die defending a lord she believed in. She has wanted a life protecting the innocent and the defenseless. With that path comes war, battle, death—she knows it and she accepts it. It is worth it, to chase such ends. 

Vengeance is not so clear a path. She avenged Renly and cut off Stannis’ head in the woods, but she felt no better in the aftermath. Renly would still never be king. Cersei wanted revenge for their theft of her army, so she rained violence down on Brienne’s homeland, and Brienne could rain violence down on her in return, until someone caught in the crossfire came back for Brienne, and so on, round and round. And still the deed was done: she has Cersei’s army, and they are not going back. Would generations need to pay?

Jon clears his throat. He casts a sharp look at Sansa. They are meant to be in a truce, fighting together on the side of the living, and she is not helping.

“Lady Brienne,” he says. “All of us here are with you in your grief. Do you wish to speak?”

She feels all eyes turn to her. She looks down at the straw and is grateful it obscures the horrible state of the remains of the man who raised her. _No_ , she says, with only a shake of her head. 

Jon nods at her and lowers the torch to the small pyre. The flames spread rapidly, crackling and smoking. 

“He will not have died in vain,” Queen Daenerys proclaims over the sounds of branches crumbling in the heat. “She will pay for what she has done to our people.” 

Jaime is motionless beside her. Not all wars come to an end.

Under the gaze of the old gods, they stand there and watch the fire burn. No one else speaks. For a moment, they all are a ring of statues, a crypt of heroes honoring another come to join them.

* * *

  
Brienne leaves the urn in which Podrick placed her father’s ashes on the table in her quarters. Lady Sansa demanded she take the night and the next day away from her service. To rest, she said, though Brienne cannot.

She walks outside, up onto a deserted stretch of the castle walls. The smell of smoke and burning death lingers in the air. Or perhaps just on her; she’s bathed and changed her clothes, but she swears the scent still clings to her. 

Even in the black of night, the Lannister tents glow across the snow-dusted land before her. Small fires throughout the camp cast red-tinted shadows on the whitened ground. She bought these soldiers with her father’s life. And they will perish in these snows, alongside the thousands of the Dragon Queen’s Essosi men who sleep just on the other side of the castle. Battle is necessary, but it is wasteful, too. 

“There you are.” She cannot see him in the darkness, but she knows the sound of Jaime’s voice better than that of most of the men here. 

“Since your squire is busy guarding the Lady Stark, I thought to stop by your rooms to see if you had need of anything,” Jaime says. “You weren’t there. This castle is bloody enormous. It took me ages to find you.”

“Thank you, but I am quite well, Ser Jaime,” she replies. A lie, of course, but he has spent enough time worrying over her. “Won’t your men be needing you?”

“The army of the dead is a few days away still, it seems,” he says. “Ser Addam can handle them for us tonight.”

 _Us_. She hopes he won’t start on that topic again. He had been bad enough on the journey north. Our men. Our camp. Our orders.

 _They’re your men and your orders, ser_ , she had reminded him. 

_You’ll be my second-in-command_ , he had said, as though it was obvious. _They’ll look to you as much as me._

She had protested. _I’m not a Lannister. I’m not even a knight! Your men won’t follow me._

He’d just chuckled. _Not yet_ , he said, _but give it time_.

On the castle wall at Winterfell, Jaime doesn’t seem to notice that he’s still doing it, still making her second-in-command in his mind. He moves closer. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, again. He’s said it so many times since they arrived. “After this is all over, you can take our men to reclaim Tarth. Avenge your father. Avenge your people. You can ride into battle with his face on your shield.”

“Jaime,” she begins. She doesn’t like when he talks like this, like the future will go on without him. 

He shakes his head.

“I know you think they won’t follow you, but they will. You’ll have whatever you need.” 

“Jaime,” she says again, more insistent. “If I’m commanding your army, where are you?” She is glad her voice doesn’t break as she speaks. It is a near miss.

He looks down at his feet. “You really think I’d sit back and send you out alone to fix the mess I made? I already did that once. I should have gone with you.”

“No,” she says, dipping her head to catch his eye. She hopes he hears all the meanings she puts into that one word. _No, I don’t think that. No, this mess isn’t yours. No, you shouldn’t have given up your duty for my sake alone._ “I think you mean to die out here. I think you mean to offer up your life in some attempt at penance, and you want to make sure all your affairs are in order before you do.”

“I just want to make sure you are safe. You didn’t deserve all this.”

“You armed and armored me,” Brienne says. “That is enough. You don’t need to give me an army to atone for what your sister did. We—we knew it was a risk to act as we did.”

Now Jaime is looking her in the eye. He’s standing so close to her, nearly chest to chest. He grabs her by the shoulder. 

“Don’t think that this is your fault,” he says. “This isn’t your fault.”

“I brought war to my father’s gate,” she whispers.

“Cersei brought war to him. There was no need for her to send all those soldiers there. It’s foolish and petty. I won’t let her get away with it.”

“I won’t ask you to stand against your kin, Jaime.”

“You won’t need to ask me,” he replies. He drops his hand to take one of her own. “I said you’d have everything you need. I mean it. Everything I can give. It’s yours. It will always be yours.”

She looks into his eyes, shining like river-smoothed stones under the light of the stars. There is sadness there, and pity, but also determination, and a softness she has always pretended was not meant for her. But there is no denying it now: it’s hers. She cannot speak, and she cannot move, but her body is anything but a statue, with Jaime’s hand in hers. 

Soon they will fight a battle. A bigger battle than either of them has ever seen, where the stakes are higher than just individual life and death. Brienne will charge into the fight to protect the living, and she will survive, to protect her home, too. Her father will be her shield in the wars to come. He will not have died in vain.

She places both her hands around Jaime’s, clasping it to her chest. She will protect him, too. “If I am to have everything I need,” she says, “then I need you, too. You must live, to fight by my side.”

He nods. He brings their joined hands to his lips. A kiss, to seal it. They will live and fight, together, in her father’s name.

He would be proud.

**Author's Note:**

> wear your masks and hang in there, friends!


End file.
